December 3, 1999 (1)

KU Medical Center’s Mobile Medical 

Unit Comes To Chanute December 9 and 10

Respiratory health medical evaluations to be held at Memorial Building

parking lot in Chanute as part of the Southeast Kansas Health Study.

KANSAS CITY, KAN. — On December 9 and 10, staff for The University of Kansas Medical Center’s mobile medical unit will conduct respiratory health medical evaluations of individuals in Chanute who have agreed to participate in the one-year evaluation for the Southeast Kansas Health Study.   KU Medical Center is conducting the EPA-funded study to investigate possible health effects related to the operation of four commercial hazardous waste burners and other emission sources located in southeast Kansas.  Chanute is the fourth of five study communities that the medical unit will visit during November and December.  The other communities are Coffeyville, Fredonia, Independence, and Sedan, which has agreed to serve as the study’s control community.

Fifty people from each study community have been invited to participate in the medical evaluations.  Those individuals received letters of invitation during the past two months.  “We have not met the 50-person goal in Chanute, but we hope that we’ll still hear from some of the people we invited before we finish the evaluations on Friday,” said H. William Barkman, M.D., who is principal investigator of the study and director of the Center for Environmental and Occupational Health at KU Medical Center.

The mobile medical unit will be parked at Chanute’s Memorial Building parking lot, located just west of City Hall, during Thursday and Friday, December 9 and 10.  It will arrive in Chanute late Wednesday afternoon, December 8, so that it can be set up and ready for the first evaluations by 8 o’clock Thursday morning.

Within the next few days, Southeast Kansas Health Study staff will call those individuals who agreed to participate in the medical evaluations and let them know the location of the unit and their appointment time.  When participants come in, they will be asked to read and sign a consent form, complete a health history, and undergo pulmonary function testing and a brief physical examination (including a blood pressure check and listening to the heart and lungs).  The medical evaluation will take place once at the beginning of the data collection year (November/December 1999) and again at the end of the year (October/November 2000).

The evaluation is designed to examine, during a one-year period, the effects of air quality on people who have a history of wheezing, asthma, or emphysema.  Individuals invited to participate in the medical evaluation were randomly selected from a database built of individuals who responded to the recent health questionnaires sent to residents in the five communities, and from data collected on hospital emergency room visits for respiratory illness in those communities. 

The mobile medical unit is tentatively scheduled to visit Independence on December 16 and 17.  “If individuals are unable to make their appointments in Chanute, then they can always come to Independence,” Barkman says.

 

The mobile medical unit is an 18-wheel tractor-trailer that is fully equipped with examining rooms, phlebotomy (blood drawing) capability, audiometry, mammography, X-ray, and pulmonary function equipment.  The 53-foot trailer is red, white, and blue with a huge jayhawk on either side and on the end of it.  “It’s hard to miss,” Barkman notes.

 

Residents who have questions about the letters, the medical evaluations, or the study should call the Southeast Kansas Health Study project office at its toll-free number, 877/511-2167.  The e-mail address is mwalker3@kumc.edu.